The M&S circuit took over this house in 1922, according to this item from the March 18 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide:
“Leases a New East Side Theatre
“The newly organized New Law Theatre Corporation, having for directors B. and C. Mayer and L. Schneider, leased for a term of 10 years the 2-sty theatre building, 40.0x70, at 23-27 Second av. M. D. Bohrar, attorney, represents the new company.”
The January 14 issue of the same publication had noted that, on January 4, the M&S circuit had bought the theater at 13-17 Second Avenue (the Woolworth Theatre, later called the Majestic.)
The name of the street is Gasser Drive. The extensive development the theater is part of is controlled by the Peter A. and Vernice H. Gasser Foundation, and Cinemark leases the property. The 2,095-seat multiplex opened on November 9, 2012.
The architect of record is Kip E. Daniel, managing director and principal of the architecture division of The Beck Group, an integrated design and construction company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Sacramento-based LPAS Architecture + Design served as site architects.
This PDF has a drawing, floor plans, and construction details of the theater.
According to this article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, the BremenTowne Theatre opened as a single-screen house. There is a photo of the 1,023-seat auditorium. The house was designed by the architectural firm of Robert Taylor & Associates.
For what it’s worth, newspaper articles from 1971 also call the house the BremenTowne Theatre, spelled and capitalized exactly the way Boxoffice did it. A Chicago Tribune article from as late as January 19, 1994, still called it the Brementowne Theater.
Both CinemaTour and our description say that the theater was moved to the other side of the mall and rebuilt as a quad at some point. DeadMalls has a page for the Brementown Mall which says pretty much the same thing, but it also says that the Mall opened in 1973, which means the theater would have predated it by two years.
The exterior photo and an architectural drawing illustrating the Boxoffice article show an outside entrance to the theater, so I suspect that DeadMalls is right about the mall having been built in 1973. Whether the original theater building was demolished or incorporated into the mall and converted to another use, I don’t know. All the information available on the Internet is pretty sketchy.
If the theater did move from the west end of the mall to the east end when the mall was built, then we actually have two entirely different theaters of the same name here. The house that opened in 1971 was a big, impressive theater. It would have been terribly wasteful for it to have been demolished, or even converted to another use, after only a couple of years, but it looks like that might be what happened.
The August 30, 1971, Boxoffice article about the addition of a second auditorium to the Chris-Town Theatre, which I cited in an earlier comment, can be seen online at this link. From the photo on the first page of the article, as well as various parts of the text, I get the impression that the Chris-Town 1 and Chris-Town 2 didn’t share any common areas inside, though the article never explicitly says that this was the case.
As I noted earlier, architects Pearson, Wuesthoff & Skinner designed the Chris-Town 2.
This article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, tells of plans for Holiday Theatres 3-6, and features a drawing of the proposed house. It says that the four-screen expansion had been planned by Denver theater designer Mel C. Glatz.
The 1972 article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier has two photos of the quad as it had been completed. That article also says that the multiplex was to be expanded again, with the addition of four more screens, but as it is still listed here as the Holiday Six I guess that second expansion was never carried out.
The Bruton Terrace IV Theatre was featured in this single-page article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are four photos. The 1,500-seat quad, operated by Texas Cinema Corporation, was designed by architect Charles Taylor.
Showcase Cinemas 4 & 5 were featured in this single-page article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are photos of the box office and concession stand. The article doesn’t specifically say if the new twin was a separate building unconnected to the earlier three screens, but I get the impression that it was. For one thing, the concession stand looked just about big enough to serve the 1,424 seats of the twin, and no more.
An article about the ABC Cinema was featured in the “Modern Theatre” section of Boxoffice on August 30, 1971. On opening, the single-screen house had 700 seats. The article confirms John Rowland Thompson (John R. Thompson & Associates) as the architect of this theater.
Also, Movie Tavern’s official page for this house currently lists it with only four screens, not five.
Here is a clickable link to the 1971 Boxoffice article kornpopper76 cited about the conversion of the Cooper 70 into a triplex. The seating capacity of the Cooper 1-2-3 was 1,656, with 832 seats in the original theater and 406 and 418 in Cinemas 2 and 3, respectively. Theater designer Mel C. Glatz collaborated with the architectural firm of Knight & Rorman on the expansion project.
Hhc632: I’m not from Colorado Springs, but could the theater you recall be the Cinema 70, located on Chelton Road just off of East Platte?
As for the multiplex at the mall, the only one we have listed is Picture Show at Citadel Crossing, which is actually across the street and apparently didn’t open until the early 1990s, so it probably isn’t the one you remember. I’ve seen a couple of references to a theater having operated in the mall in the 1970s, but haven’t found any details about it, other than that it has been closed and probably demolished for the expansion of a department store. It isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
In a 1921 telephone directory, 39 N. Oak Street was listed as the address of the Arcade Theatre, featuring moving pictures. That year, Mt. Carmel also had the Valentine Theatre, at 14 S. Oak, and the Theatorium, at 112 S. Oak, both also moving picture houses. There might have been other theaters that didn’t have telephones yet.
The address of the Lyric Restaurant, still located in the former theater, is 33 W. Center Street. Here is a Google Street View, since ours isn’t currently working.
The Lyric Theatre was noted in the “Among the Picture Theaters” feature of The Moving Picture World for March 22, 1913 (scan here). The house had been recently built for owner-operator Richard Dabb, on the site of his earlier theater of the same name.
An earlier Photoplay Theatre was located on South Main Street and opened in 1910 or 1911. Here is it’s (sparse) page at Utah Theatres. One or the other of the Photoplays was mentioned in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“The Photoplay theater is one of the smaller houses of Salt Lake that has enjoyed continued prosperity for several years. It was built by some ranchers and later sold to Mrs. McGrath, its present manager.”
Because the article says it had been in operation for several years, I suspect that it was the first house of that name. I’ve found no other trade journal references to a Photoplay Theatre in Salt Lake City.
Bing’s map quirk is especially odd considering that Main Street runs north and south, not east and west. But I’ve found that it works with any directional indicator- N., S., E., or W. Only the plain Main Street goes to the wrong location.
When I searched the address on Bing Maps, plain Main Street fetched up in a residential neighborhood in West Seneca. Adding E. to it put it in the right place. Google Maps does go to the downtown Buffalo location with or without the E.
The address of the Telenews Theatre was 525 E. Main Street.
This PDF from rjbuffalo.com gives the theater at 525 Main Street, Buffalo, a whole string of aka’s. It opened as the Vendome Theatre in 1909. On February 4, 1912, it became the Happy Hour Theatre, and retained that name until ca.1931, when it was renamed the Embassy Theatre. On April 17, 1942, it became the Telenews Theatre, but was renamed the Vogue Theatre in May, 1946. Two years later it returned to the name Telenews, but was renamed the Guild Theatre by 1950.
The document notes that the Vendome was apparently a conversion of an existing building and the theater was designed by architect F.A. Baynes; that it extended through the block to Washington Street; and that at the time the document was written it housed a Chinese restaurant, which is apparently still there. Google Street View shows the Washington Street end of the building, as Main Street has been converted into a transit mall and the camera car didn’t travel along this block of it.
The document also carries a cryptic note saying “Not to be confused with the Empire at 261 Main, the Empire at 1514 Main, or the Empire at 164–170 Pearl.” This is odd, as Empire Theatre is not listed among the aka’s for the house.
The June 9, 1915, issue of Building and Engineering News ran an item that is probably about the Strand Theatre:
“VALLEJO, SOLANO CO., CAL.— Theatre and stores, 2 story and base, reinforced concrete, 35,000. Architect, B. J. Joseph, New Call Bldg.. S. F. Owner, Albert Bernheim. The building will be erected on Georgia street west of Marin, and will cover a large ground area. Besides the theatre the first floor will contain a number of stores. Upper floor will be arranged for offices. Interior of the theatre will be finished in ornamental plaster. Pine trim will be used. There will be steam heat and vacuum cleaning. Special electric work and sheet metal work is called for in the theatre. Patent store fronts are specified. Exterior of the building will be faced with cement plaster. Plans are complete and figures are being taken.”
I’ve come across enough period references to the architect of this theater to be convinced that his name is indeed J. Flood Walker. One item is this from the March 17, 1915, issue of Building and Engineering News:
“SANTA ANA, ORANGE CO., CAL.—
"Theatre. 1 story and base, brick. $25,000. Architect. J. Flood Walker. 303 East 4th street, Santa Ana. Owners, West End Improvement Association. The building will be erected at the corner of 4th and Birch streets and will cover a large ground area. There will be two stores besides the theatre. Interior will be finished in pine and ornamental plaster. There will be a special ventilating system, special electric work and metal window sash and frames. Exterior of the building will be faced with pressed brick. Plans are now being prepared.”
Here is an item from the February 17, 1915, issue of Building and Engineering News about the alteration of the Chutes Theatre that took place that year, when it was converted into a movie house:
“THEATRE ALTERATION — Concrete
and steel. Cost not stated. San Francisco. Architect, J. R. Miller, Lick Bldg-, S. F. Owners, Realty and Rebuilding Co. The old Chutes Theatre will be moved to the rear of the present stores on Fillmore street between Turk and Eddy streets and a new entrance and other alterations made to conform with the law. Plans are complete and work will be started shortly.”
This brief biography of architect Bjarne H. Moe, from the Washington State Department of Archaeology & Historic Preservation, says that he was the architect for a remodeling of the Capitol Theatre in Walla Walla in 1938.
hanksykes said earlier that the Park Hall Theatre was built in 1913 by builders Moorman & John. The January 4, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item saying that builders Moorman and John, of Oakley, Ohio, had commissioned architect Edward Sloctemyer to design a theater for them, which was to be built on Madison Road near Gilmore Avenue. No theater name was given, but it must have been the Park Hall/Ambassador.
The January 4, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World had an item about the Sequoia Theatre. The house had opened on November 22, 1910, with 600 seats. It was exclusively a movie house, and the building was 36 feet wide by 130 feet deep, with a lobby 20 feet deep. The operator of the Sequoia was Isidor F. Morris.
On this web page, Cezar Del Valle says that the Bijou Dream was at 106 Main Street East. The first theater in Rochester to be devoted exclusively to movies, it opened in 1906, and closed on February 28, 1913. The space was converted into a cigar store.
The M&S circuit took over this house in 1922, according to this item from the March 18 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide:
The January 14 issue of the same publication had noted that, on January 4, the M&S circuit had bought the theater at 13-17 Second Avenue (the Woolworth Theatre, later called the Majestic.)The architect of record for the Cinemark Station Park XD 14 at Farmington is Kip E. Daniel of The Beck Group.
The name of the street is Gasser Drive. The extensive development the theater is part of is controlled by the Peter A. and Vernice H. Gasser Foundation, and Cinemark leases the property. The 2,095-seat multiplex opened on November 9, 2012.
The architect of record is Kip E. Daniel, managing director and principal of the architecture division of The Beck Group, an integrated design and construction company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Sacramento-based LPAS Architecture + Design served as site architects.
This PDF has a drawing, floor plans, and construction details of the theater.
The architect of record for the Cinemark 18 at Pittsburgh Mills is Kip E. Daniel of The Beck Group.
According to this article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, the BremenTowne Theatre opened as a single-screen house. There is a photo of the 1,023-seat auditorium. The house was designed by the architectural firm of Robert Taylor & Associates.
For what it’s worth, newspaper articles from 1971 also call the house the BremenTowne Theatre, spelled and capitalized exactly the way Boxoffice did it. A Chicago Tribune article from as late as January 19, 1994, still called it the Brementowne Theater.
Both CinemaTour and our description say that the theater was moved to the other side of the mall and rebuilt as a quad at some point. DeadMalls has a page for the Brementown Mall which says pretty much the same thing, but it also says that the Mall opened in 1973, which means the theater would have predated it by two years.
The exterior photo and an architectural drawing illustrating the Boxoffice article show an outside entrance to the theater, so I suspect that DeadMalls is right about the mall having been built in 1973. Whether the original theater building was demolished or incorporated into the mall and converted to another use, I don’t know. All the information available on the Internet is pretty sketchy.
If the theater did move from the west end of the mall to the east end when the mall was built, then we actually have two entirely different theaters of the same name here. The house that opened in 1971 was a big, impressive theater. It would have been terribly wasteful for it to have been demolished, or even converted to another use, after only a couple of years, but it looks like that might be what happened.
The August 30, 1971, Boxoffice article about the addition of a second auditorium to the Chris-Town Theatre, which I cited in an earlier comment, can be seen online at this link. From the photo on the first page of the article, as well as various parts of the text, I get the impression that the Chris-Town 1 and Chris-Town 2 didn’t share any common areas inside, though the article never explicitly says that this was the case.
As I noted earlier, architects Pearson, Wuesthoff & Skinner designed the Chris-Town 2.
This article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, tells of plans for Holiday Theatres 3-6, and features a drawing of the proposed house. It says that the four-screen expansion had been planned by Denver theater designer Mel C. Glatz.
The 1972 article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier has two photos of the quad as it had been completed. That article also says that the multiplex was to be expanded again, with the addition of four more screens, but as it is still listed here as the Holiday Six I guess that second expansion was never carried out.
The Bruton Terrace IV Theatre was featured in this single-page article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are four photos. The 1,500-seat quad, operated by Texas Cinema Corporation, was designed by architect Charles Taylor.
Showcase Cinemas 4 & 5 were featured in this single-page article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are photos of the box office and concession stand. The article doesn’t specifically say if the new twin was a separate building unconnected to the earlier three screens, but I get the impression that it was. For one thing, the concession stand looked just about big enough to serve the 1,424 seats of the twin, and no more.
An article about the ABC Cinema was featured in the “Modern Theatre” section of Boxoffice on August 30, 1971. On opening, the single-screen house had 700 seats. The article confirms John Rowland Thompson (John R. Thompson & Associates) as the architect of this theater.
Also, Movie Tavern’s official page for this house currently lists it with only four screens, not five.
Here is a clickable link to the 1971 Boxoffice article kornpopper76 cited about the conversion of the Cooper 70 into a triplex. The seating capacity of the Cooper 1-2-3 was 1,656, with 832 seats in the original theater and 406 and 418 in Cinemas 2 and 3, respectively. Theater designer Mel C. Glatz collaborated with the architectural firm of Knight & Rorman on the expansion project.
Hhc632: I’m not from Colorado Springs, but could the theater you recall be the Cinema 70, located on Chelton Road just off of East Platte?
As for the multiplex at the mall, the only one we have listed is Picture Show at Citadel Crossing, which is actually across the street and apparently didn’t open until the early 1990s, so it probably isn’t the one you remember. I’ve seen a couple of references to a theater having operated in the mall in the 1970s, but haven’t found any details about it, other than that it has been closed and probably demolished for the expansion of a department store. It isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
In a 1921 telephone directory, 39 N. Oak Street was listed as the address of the Arcade Theatre, featuring moving pictures. That year, Mt. Carmel also had the Valentine Theatre, at 14 S. Oak, and the Theatorium, at 112 S. Oak, both also moving picture houses. There might have been other theaters that didn’t have telephones yet.
The address of the Lyric Restaurant, still located in the former theater, is 33 W. Center Street. Here is a Google Street View, since ours isn’t currently working.
The Lyric Theatre was noted in the “Among the Picture Theaters” feature of The Moving Picture World for March 22, 1913 (scan here). The house had been recently built for owner-operator Richard Dabb, on the site of his earlier theater of the same name.
An earlier Photoplay Theatre was located on South Main Street and opened in 1910 or 1911. Here is it’s (sparse) page at Utah Theatres. One or the other of the Photoplays was mentioned in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
Because the article says it had been in operation for several years, I suspect that it was the first house of that name. I’ve found no other trade journal references to a Photoplay Theatre in Salt Lake City.Bing’s map quirk is especially odd considering that Main Street runs north and south, not east and west. But I’ve found that it works with any directional indicator- N., S., E., or W. Only the plain Main Street goes to the wrong location.
When I searched the address on Bing Maps, plain Main Street fetched up in a residential neighborhood in West Seneca. Adding E. to it put it in the right place. Google Maps does go to the downtown Buffalo location with or without the E.
The address of the Telenews Theatre was 525 E. Main Street.
This PDF from rjbuffalo.com gives the theater at 525 Main Street, Buffalo, a whole string of aka’s. It opened as the Vendome Theatre in 1909. On February 4, 1912, it became the Happy Hour Theatre, and retained that name until ca.1931, when it was renamed the Embassy Theatre. On April 17, 1942, it became the Telenews Theatre, but was renamed the Vogue Theatre in May, 1946. Two years later it returned to the name Telenews, but was renamed the Guild Theatre by 1950.
The document notes that the Vendome was apparently a conversion of an existing building and the theater was designed by architect F.A. Baynes; that it extended through the block to Washington Street; and that at the time the document was written it housed a Chinese restaurant, which is apparently still there. Google Street View shows the Washington Street end of the building, as Main Street has been converted into a transit mall and the camera car didn’t travel along this block of it.
The document also carries a cryptic note saying “Not to be confused with the Empire at 261 Main, the Empire at 1514 Main, or the Empire at 164–170 Pearl.” This is odd, as Empire Theatre is not listed among the aka’s for the house.
The June 9, 1915, issue of Building and Engineering News ran an item that is probably about the Strand Theatre:
I’ve come across enough period references to the architect of this theater to be convinced that his name is indeed J. Flood Walker. One item is this from the March 17, 1915, issue of Building and Engineering News:
Here is an item from the February 17, 1915, issue of Building and Engineering News about the alteration of the Chutes Theatre that took place that year, when it was converted into a movie house:
This brief biography of architect Bjarne H. Moe, from the Washington State Department of Archaeology & Historic Preservation, says that he was the architect for a remodeling of the Capitol Theatre in Walla Walla in 1938.
hanksykes said earlier that the Park Hall Theatre was built in 1913 by builders Moorman & John. The January 4, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item saying that builders Moorman and John, of Oakley, Ohio, had commissioned architect Edward Sloctemyer to design a theater for them, which was to be built on Madison Road near Gilmore Avenue. No theater name was given, but it must have been the Park Hall/Ambassador.
The January 4, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World had an item about the Sequoia Theatre. The house had opened on November 22, 1910, with 600 seats. It was exclusively a movie house, and the building was 36 feet wide by 130 feet deep, with a lobby 20 feet deep. The operator of the Sequoia was Isidor F. Morris.
On this web page, Cezar Del Valle says that the Bijou Dream was at 106 Main Street East. The first theater in Rochester to be devoted exclusively to movies, it opened in 1906, and closed on February 28, 1913. The space was converted into a cigar store.